No matter what kind of game you find yourself in, no matter how good or bad the luck, you can change your life completely with a single thought or a single act of love.— Gregory David Roberts, author of Shantaram, a novel.

Pre-Election Blues II: Bushvilles Spring Up All Over The United States

In Reno, Nevada, a small group of tents populated by homeless people sprang up by the railroad tracks. People with nowhere else to go. Within a short time there were over 150 tents, so close to each other they could barely breathe, filled with people who had come to Reno to look for work.

There was none.

This wasn’t only happening in Reno. It was happening in Seattle, Washington, Athens, Ga., Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Cal., and Portland, Oregon. Tent cities being born all over the U.S.A. as the foreclosure explosion took off and the hurricanes hit Texas and Mississippi and the stock market crashed.

This isn’t a recession — it’s a depression and these communities filled with homeless people are the result of the Bush administration’s greedy policies that protect the rich corporations and have no regard for the people.

In the 1930′s they were called Hoovervilles, named after the president of that era. These new tent cities are Bushvilles, directly caused by the policies that have driven our country into 10,000,000,000,000,000 of debt.

Debt caused by the Iraqi War, the corporate bailouts, the sell-outs, the collapse of our infrastructure.

“It’s clear that poverty and homelessness have increased,” said Michael Stoops, acting Director of the National Coalition for the Homeless.

Between the wars, the hurricanes, the business practices of our current regime and the collapsing stock market, we now have The Perfect Storm creating Bushvilles all over the United States.

God help us because it appears that we are not helping ourselves. Well, it seems that the corporate rich are helping themselves to everything and leaving the crumbs for us.

If Barack Obama doesn’t win the election for president, it will be the end of the United States of America. We’ll all live in Bushvilles.